Interview with Google Search Guru

Posted on Sunday, April 20 2008 @ 7:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Popular Mechanics had an interview with Google's vice president of search quality Udi Manber about web search. Here's a snip:
What do you think are the next coming challenges beyond what we’ve talked about?

I think one of them is a better understanding of queries and content, which is what we do all the time. If I were to point to one interesting feature that we launched recently—and unfortunately I can’t talk about coming features [since] we don’t pre-announce things—one feature we launched recently is something called CLIR. It stands for Cross Language Information Retrieval. Basically, what we do is take your query, translate it into another language, do the search in another language, translate the results back to your language so that gives you access to content in, I think, 12 different languages. So if you’re a user in Egypt, for example, and you only speak Arabic, you can write the query in Arabic, ask to translate it into English. When you then click on the results, it will translate the Web pages to Arabic for you—all of it done by Google translation. That opens the whole world to everybody. I see this as incredibly high potential.
More over here.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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